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#GamerGate and the Puppy Coup, Round 2: Breaking Windows and Redefining the Norm

Of course I’m going to keep talking about the Hugos, last week was the first post I ever made that made me any money. But seriously, all jokes aside, there’s a lot more I want to talk about on the matter. Like I said last week, this is a big deal. How could I contain it to just one blog post? This is, along with #GamerGate, a defining moment in the history of geek fandom.

What sparked this second post was a reddit conversation by some liberals discussing the broken window effect. For those of you who don’t know, the best description of the broken window effect and its application comes from Malcom Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point.” The idea is that small, petty crimes in urban environments like public drinking, vandalism, and toll-jumping contribute to a social atmosphere where larger, more troublesome crimes like robbery, rape, and assault are more likely to happen. If a window is broken and not fixed, it becomes acceptable to break windows. When breaking windows is acceptable, soon other petty crimes become acceptable. When those crimes become acceptable, larger crimes soon become acceptable. One thing leads to another, and soon you get Detroit.

Broken window theory was one of the driving forces behind Rudy Guliani’s policy that effectively turned New York City around. “The Tipping Point” focuses on the Guliani administration’s cleaning graffiti off of subway cars in order to help curb toll-jumping. By keeping the cars cleaner and nicer, it created an atmosphere that favored civilization over crime. Guliani’s administration cleaned up NYC in other ways as well- he rid Times Square of most of the vice that it was famous for, and made it a family destination. He encouraged a more strict NYPD that cracked down harder on petty crime, creating an atmosphere of public order. In Singapore, the great Lee Kuan Yew did the same thing, cracking down on minor transgressions like spitting, littering, and chewing gum in public as to create order.

Nowadays, broken window theory has fallen out of favor. While only a select few question its effectiveness, liberals soon realized that whenever you build your police policy around the broken windows theory, it means that more black people wind up in prison for criminal behavior. In fact, the idea of improving the neighborhood to keep crime rates down often eventually leads to gentrification. In fact, you could argue that the new ideology of “Dinduism” to spring up from the Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown incidents was coined in direct response to broken window theory: it doesn’t matter that Trayvon Martin or Mike Brown or Eric Garner were acting in a way that was detrimental to public order- neighborhood watch or even the police keeping tabs on them to enforce said order is just racist!

The greater irony in all of this is that liberals love to use broken window theory. Of course, rather than use it to preserve public order, they use it to create a more “equal” society. The entire reason why liberals get so mad over “micro-aggressions” is because those are their broken windows- minor, seemingly harmless actions that reinforce bad attitudes which create an undesirable society. Thus, to the liberal, every single bold anti-liberal, anti-leftist transgression that goes unpunished helps set the precedent that this sort of wrongthink is okay.

This explains the mass amount of rage over the Puppy Coup. More often than not, the rage comes back to one single target: Vox Day. Most of the Sad Puppies are moderate liberals and moderate right-wingers. To them, the Sad Puppy slate is about restoring balance and neutrality to the Hugo Awards. But Vox Day’s Rabid Puppy slate is even more offensive and more enraging- because it means someone as brazenly, unabashedly anti-liberal as Vox Day can win an award. It means that Vox Day has power and influence. It’s him breaking a window and them being unable to punish him for it. The anti-Puppy old guard is screaming for blood, because they know how the slippery slope works. If Vox Day can participate in Sci-Fi/Fantasy, it means people like Vox Day who agree with Vox Day’s views are also welcome. It means that now, evil right-wing people like myself will start to participate in SFF.

That’s also why the leftist rage against #GamerGate has been so severe. Leftists hate #GamerGate because #GamerGate hurt leftists and continues to hurt them, and no one is getting punished for it. Nero is going to E3. Brandon and Liz now write for the Escapist. Jen Dawe and Rogue both got their games on steam, and TFYC is likely to follow. #GamerGate is not going away, #GamerGate is only becoming more visible and more culturally influential in gaming. #GamerGate has broken so many windows.

And ultimately, we need to break even more windows. We need to find more windows and break them. We need to flood the comments sections of anti-#GamerGate websites and make our presence known. We need to find a way around the block lists so we can make it very clear to the opposition that twitter is our territory. We need to spread our shit-talk of SJWs to the public sphere, and go public. Every time #GamerGate gets to transgress against the SJW norm without consequences, we make transgressing against them more acceptable.

One of my personal idols is weev. I get that it’s kind of weird for a gay sperg to like weev, but the man is simply brilliant. He once said to me that his goal was “to widen the overton window until genocide becomes acceptable”. In a sense, Encyclopedia Dramatica has done just that: it’s become the perfect tool to attack the SJW establishment without consequence. Someone on /r/GamerGhazi was chimping out quite hard because googling “Sarah Nyberg” brought up little Nicky’s page on ED. If anyone wants to look up nick Nyberg’s body of work, the first thing they see is that he’s a sexual deviant and complete waste of flesh. ED helps give a platform for otherwise unspeakable ideas and lets people find them, internalize them, and spread them. Part of what helps keep troll behavior alive is that ED can exist without repercussions. Weev is part of what was the most successful window-breaker in internet history.

And yes, I know weev doesn’t think too highly of #GamerGate. But that doesn’t make him any less brilliant. We need to take a page from his book and be more aggressive and transgressive. Every time we hurt SJWs and get away with it, we de-legitimatize them and make hurting SJWs more acceptable. Every time we take away a safe space, we assert that we’re the norm, not them. Every time an Ellen Pao or Sabrina Erdely gets publicly humiliated, they are forced back into the shadows. At this point the #GamerGate doctrine should be to attack, attack attack.

Think about it this way- the more people publicly shit on Gawker and Vox, the easier it will be to pull away their advertisers through our e-mailing. The more vocally people shit on Anita and friends, the harder it will be for the games press to ignore it or try to rebuke us. The more #GamerGate embeds itself into gaming culture, the harder it’ll be for games press and SJWs to take it over. We need to break all of the windows and graffiti all of the subway cars, and change things so #GamerGate is the norm.